1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a process of energy management and, more particularly, to a process and apparatus for enabling energy industries to effectively manage their operations via the use of intelligent programming agents, also called programming robots or “bots”, for autonomously performing tasks such as collecting information from utility meters, detecting operating problems and analyze data collected from the utility meters on behalf of the user over the Internet or some other computer network, within the framework of the energy or utility industry operations. These intelligent agents can be mobile, e.g. they roam the Internet or a system of computers, or they can be fixed. The agents are written in a high-level computer language and are set up to operate across many different computer platforms.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are 265,000,000 existing utility meters, e.g. electric, gas and water, using the Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) program as nodes on the internet with their own universal resource locator (URL) or Internet Protocol (IP) address. Reading of the electric meter has been a major function of the utility company since this is the only real physical connection with the customer and it is the major revenue source for the utility and provides a security of supply and the orderly availability of electric power. There is an entire allied industry specializing in meter reading and meter reading tools. Meter reading and meter service accounting has been literally a “chore” for these companies and they have tried many ways to improve this function, these have historically included:                1) Drive-by readers where the specially fitted meter transmitter sends out a radio signal which a truck picks up with a special receiver;        2) Radio frequency metering which includes a broadcast from the meter to a central station on a low power system;        3) Cellular and wireless systems, which read the meter, transmitted signal over the wireless network; and        4) Powerline carrier systems like the Turtle or TWACS system which send a signal down the transmission power line back to the utility.        
Several applications of energy management exist today at various levels of sophistication and at different levels of operation from a single building to a whole utility system. Operationally, they vary from manually controlled systems which physically read and tabulate the electric power use in buildings and at enduser sites to fully interactive computer controlled systems that have massive amounts of dedicated computer resources interacting with the meters and sensors at a given site. The latter are large complex systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and must be manned by a staff of real-time technicians. At the utility level, energy management is basically load forecasting. Load forecasting is a necessary part of resource management for these power generating companies. The better the load forecasts the more efficiently can the resources of the utility be configured to minimize operating costs.
Load forecasting which is critical to efficient allocation of utility resources has been utilized by several utilities using various algorithmic processes with historical data, but to date, none have used the ubiquitous nature of the internet to leverage the knowledge of their customer base to optimize forecasting and thereby minimize fuel use, their greatest cost center. None of these systems have any rudimentary attempts of intelligent agent use. Some of the current load forecasting approaches use fuzzy logic, regression and neural networks to develop forecasts.
The present invention can integrate all the current computational functions along with real time Internet derived data into a cohesive whole that runs on computer servers and uses the Internet as the basic communication backbone. By integrating the historical data and the accepted technologies with our real time information the present invention provides, a more realistic load forecast for resource allocation and optimization can be developed. The method of the present invention allows for 1-hour, 24-hour and 120-hour load forecasts by the utility. The present invention allows for a forward looking energy assessment (FLEA) to be made and updated continuously as part of the normal operating practices of the utility or power generator/provider.
The use of intelligent agents in the energy management and power generation industries has not been attempted because of the inherent nature of the industry in the past. Most power companies have been regulated utility operations with a preset and known rate of return provided by the regulatory agencies that oversee these entities and there was no need to innovate. Today with the looming deregulation in most states and by Federal mandate these companies have to be economically competitive and more cost conscious. To meet this need, various approaches have been attempted to outsource operations and use more modern approaches for operations but in general there has been no major shift internally in these companies. The use of intelligent agents has been focused in other areas not related to energy and power generation. U.S. Pat. No. 5,920,848 shows the use of intelligent agents in financial transactions and accounting. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,200 uses an intelligent agent to perform delegated tasks. U.S. Pat. No. 5,926,798 uses agents in on kine commerce on the Internet. U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,202 intelligently monitors power consumption with a set of computer software modules. None of these approaches have focused on the use addressed by the subject invention, e.g. the energy generation and distribution industry.